Friday, 12 January 2018

Twelve Dark Passages

Text written to Sam Winston's DARKNESS VISIBLE project at the South Bank and, for one evening, at The Whitechapel Gallery on 11 January 2018

1

As we enter night we close the curtains to make sure the
room is dark. We are moving to a different house. The night house. The hall,
the kitchen, the bathroom, the spare room, put on their masks and turn to the
wall.

2

As a child I saw animals come and go, squeezing their way
through walls, then drifting from this world to the next and back as though
they belonged to both. They were eyeless and soft as the dark that received
them. They were, as I knew even then, thoughts formed to the purpose, their
business to fill the dark spaces provided for them both outside and inside the
skull, which was the darkest of the dark spaces at the very heart of the
problem.

3
It is not a problem to us. It is dark, so we sleep. That is normal. We enter
the normal through the simple subterfuge of turning off the lights and closing
our eyes, the closing of the eyes being an affirmation of the normality we have
chosen. This now is normality. This is the lightly-cushioned vacuum we have chosen.
Lean back, stretch out, curl up, listen.

Hear.

The room is studded with noise that lulls and spikes. It grinds its way through
the space that is now divided between room and body, a space that so fills the
head it is positively dense with it. We have entered the train that passes, the
boy that shouts, the laughter that builds and peaks and splits into constituent
noises.

We have entered.

Now think.

Think night and what night provides even without night, in
the simplest terms of its darkness. The mind begins to move and feel its way
round. The entrances and exits of childhood begin to present themselves as
possibilities. Here is that endlessly complicated building you entered somehow
but could not leave. Here are its stairways, cellars and precipices. Don’t look
over the rails! Is that someone falling? Is it someone you know? Is it the most
loved of those who should not fall who is now falling?

4
This nonsense monologue continues on another level. This is language after all,
not darkness, not an image. When a smell appears it quickly finds a name. When
a voice laughs, it quickly lodges in a phrase or cadence.

Let’s build something out of this. Let’s make some kind of statue, a sculpture.

5
Imagine

a web

constituted

of such thin

filaments

they might be

strings stretched beyond their capaci ty

on an imagined

micro-

scopic

inst-

rument

Here’s the spider

scuttling

to its natural music,

its codas and counterpoints,

its musical terminology of bar lines

its suspensions

its hemi-demi-semiquavers

its acciaccaturas

its gasping drops

its staccato and stuttering

its splintered crochets.

Oh spider,

hang in there,

help is coming!

6

Having established a bedrock of pure darkness we may perhaps
be able to name its sub-classes, all the classic blacks we know. Let’s say
their names: Ebony, Taupe, Davy’s Grey,
Noir, Charcoal, Soot, Jet, Onyx, Lamp Black, Carbon Black, Super Black,
Vantablack. That black.

The black of your polished shoe, the black of the ribbon on the undertaker’s
hat, the black of drypoint in curled metal. The raven, the crow, the rook, the
blackbird, the black swan. And other blacks. Keep adding. These are only names,
and names are there to be invented. But do it in darkness. In the dark backward
and abysm of time. In time’s eloquence. In time’s infinite capacity and its
vast belly that keeps expanding and never will stop expanding.

Are we there yet? Is the thought of time a black thought
yet? Is darkness visible supposed to be visible?

It’s just a room. These are just thoughts waking to find themselves returning
as words. But they are waking in darkness, a darkness in which it makes no
difference whether your eyes are shut or not.

7

If I were to think rationally about this

in the form of a sonnet, say, this is what

it would look like: without emphasis,

its lines open at first but eventually shut.
If this were a game with proper rules we might

roll the dice and chance the next move into

the dark before us. We could call that night.
We could play the game all the way through.

If this were convention we could call upon

exemplars and enter the last six lines as if

they were our last six lives, and then be gone,

having served our purpose, terminal and stiff,
with just a couplet as an ironic gesture, a spark

to briefly light what should remain as dark.

8

I have paced the room and know its dimensions. I can trace
the wire back

to the plug and socket. I know where the couch and table
are, and where the chair

is in relation to the table. I can feel my way to the door
and the wall with the window. I can assure myself this is so. I can sit down. I
can close my eyes, I can speak into the recording machine. I can chronicle my
time and circumscribe it. I can even locate, or think I can locate, the ‘I’
figure that haunts these lines of writing and trap it, right here. This I.
Can’t I?

9

When I was a child I wanted the door left open at night so
some light could get in. The light meant the outside world was still there: my
mother, my father, the geography of the entire apartment, the sense that I
hadn’t entirely left them. A few years later, still a child, I saw a television
programme where a tiger was enticed into a house and left to roam it. From then
on the outside world meant danger so I had to have the door closed.

But there were dangers in semi-darkness too. Clothes left
hanging on the door began to walk and drift towards me. The room lost
dimension. It was all drift. Beyond the window, if I drew the curtains, would
be a street that had little to do with me at night. It was the beginning of a
world that extended into the infinite distance, across the house, over the
park, beyond the railway line, past the industrial estate, disappearing down
tunnels into the air, into the desolation of a universe lit by lampposts.

Darkness is not night. It is simply darkness. It depends
where you find it and how easily you can leave it. Your body becomes an object
in a specific space, a vulnerable location that is, nevertheless, habitable.
What you cannot see expands into a set of alternatives. Don your blindfold. Put
your hand into this bag? What do you feel? What if I suggested what it might be?
What after all have you been expecting? Those are your own fingers, aren’t
they? You’d know them even in the dark, wouldn’t you? Can you feel them moving
around the inside of your head? There! Now you’ve located them. Now locate
yourself. Be your own object. Possess something.

11

The idea of total darkness is not the same as total
darkness.
The idea of light is not the same as light.
The words expressing the idea of light or total darkness are not ideas.

This word may be imagined vanishing into total darkness.

This word has begun to express an idea but most of it is
lost in darkness

1 comment:

Fantastico! Even reading it. Performance another thing. Wonderful must be. I read somewhere long ago of a person who was going about in the Himalayas. It went something like this, that he was directed to a cave he was seeking where there lived a holy man, let's say a monk, who had visions. The person went into the cave with the monk and right in the very back where there wasn't even the faintest hope of of light and sat with the monk in absolute darkness such as he'd never experienced and waited, and sure enough before long he witnessed what the monk was seeing for himself. Ciao!